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Our Community

Ashoka Changemakers creates opportunities for companies, foundations, and impact-sector peers to partner in—and co-create—large-scale social change. As partners, we will work together to build communities that are focused on solving our world’s most pressing problems.

Over the past 30 years, Ashoka has built a worldwide reputation for finding and electing the very best social innovators and institutions by drawing out the most insightful trends in social innovation. As one of Ashoka’s oldest and largest programs, Ashoka Changemakers allows partners to tap into an already established community of more than 20,000 social innovators on the Changemakers online platform, 3,200+ leading social entrepreneurs (Ashoka Fellows), 200+ changemaking universities and schools, and numerous experts in relevant fields.

In addition to creating social impact, Ashoka Changemakers creates real business impact for its partners. Some of the ways we do this include:

Identifying investment and co-creation opportunities

Enabling our partners to create a culture of changemaking within their organizations, including social intrapreneurship

Bringing innovative ideas into a company

Expanding markets by leveraging the critical strengths of both business and citizen sectors to create greater social, economic, and environmental value

Our Products

Social Innovation Challenges

Using prizes as incentives to find, engage, and activate a community of leading innovators, as well as other stakeholders (institutions, businesses, etc.), we accelerate collective impact in a particular issue area.

Course-Activated Communities

We use online learning journeys that draw from the incredible insights and people within Ashoka’s global community of social entrepreneurs to create communities of practice that learn together and collaborate around a specific impact area.

Social Innovation Mapping

The mapping process, refined over a decade, provides an understanding of the landscape of social innovation for an issue, identifying the leading practitioners in the space, and highlighting the most effective strategies for igniting an ecosystem that drives change.

Emerging Innovator Bootcamps

Bootcamps are short-term, high-intensity, in-person training events where we curate and convene leading emerging innovators, build core leadership skills, strengthen their storytelling abilities, and increase the scale of their overall impact.

Our Partnerships

Here are some examples of how our partners are using the product frameworks mentioned above to design opportunities for social and business impact:

In 2013, we began a partnership with the The Lego Foundation to transform the way the world learns. We first created a map of the barriers and successful design principles in the field through a Social Innovation Mapping that tapped into the knowledge of the leading learning and skill-building entrepreneurs in Ashoka’s network. Then we designed and executed a global prize challenge to find the leading innovators in the field and foster a community that is using the design principles to tackle barriers within the field, to ultimately transform the way the world learns.

In 2014, we began a partnership with The Packard Foundation to build a community of innovators that are changing the San Francisco Bay Area by activating empathy among its citizens. The Building Vibrant Communities Challenge found and engaged more than 200 Bay Area innovators that are using empathy to change their community. This challenge laid the foundation for enabling a regional community, that is committed to long-term change, to use a range of local convenings to foster the critical connections needed to make significant impact within the area.

In 2014, we partnered with Boehringer-Ingelheim to create a course-activated community around social intrapreneurship for innovating in the health and wellness space. We brought together employees from more than 30 leading companies— includingBoehringer-Ingelheim, Barclays, Boston Consulting Group, and Vodafone—plus leading social entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, for collaborative learning about the skills needed to intrapreneur within large companies, and to innovate in the health and wellness community.

In 2012, we began a partnership with American Express to help social innovators around the globe take their ideas to the next level of impact. Using a two- to three-day immersive program called Emerging Innovator Boot Camps, AMEX and Ashoka use their networks to provide training, mentoring, and opportunities that helped a cohort of highly skilled entrepreneurs advance their venture models. Through multiple boot camps each year, this group of innovators is quickly becoming a community of the world’s future leaders for social innovation.

These are just a few examples that demonstrate how we’ve built partnerships during the past decade with leading companies and foundations whose ideas, investments, networks, and people have combined with our own to accelerate impact throughout the world.